The following study is interested in Dorothy Wordsworth's formation of her unique authorial identity and environmental ethos. I attend to her poetry and prose, specifically her journals written at Grasmere and her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1874) to demonstrate how she shaped her individual voice while navigating her occasionally conflicting roles of sister and writer. My project begins with a chapter providing a selective biographical and critical history of Dorothy Wordsworth and details how my work emerges from current trends in scholarship and continues an ongoing critical conversation about Dorothy Wordsworth's agency and originality. In my analysis of Dorothy's distinct poetic voice, I compare selections of her writing with William's to demonstrate how Dorothy expressed her perspectives regarding nature, community, and her place within her environment. In my chapter on Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, I analyze the ways in which Dorothy's narrative embraces the tenets of the picturesque while simultaneously acknowledging the tradition's limitations. Her environmental perspective was inherently rooted in domesticity; the idea of home and her community connections influenced how she engaged with and then recorded the environments she traveled to and the people she met. My project concludes by demonstrating how Dorothy Wordsworth's environmental ethos relates to the values promoted by modern environmental writers. Dorothy was intimately connected to her home and environment and modern environmental protection and conservation efforts encourage human connection to home and place. I consider how modern environmentalist movements could benefit from embodying the empathy that Dorothy showed for the natural world in their practices today. / Master of Arts / My thesis argues that while Dorothy Wordsworth was intrinsically involved in her brother William's poetic process, she actively created a unique writerly identity that can be detected throughout her journals and poems. My project begins with a chapter detailing how my work emerges from current trends in Dorothy Wordsworth scholarship, including feminist and ecocritical studies. In my analysis of Dorothy's individual poetic voice, I suggest that through her distinctive style and her mingling of poetry and prose, Dorothy was strongly asserting herself and her perspectives even when they conflicted with William's. Dorothy's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland exemplifies her unique environmental perspective, which was influenced by her community-centered identity; this contributes to what she chooses to recollect in her journal. My project concludes by demonstrating how Dorothy Wordsworth's environmental ethos relates to the values promoted by modern environmental writers. Dorothy was intimately connected to her home and environment and modern environmental protection and conservation efforts encourage human connection to home and place. I consider how modern environmentalist movements could benefit from embodying the empathy that Dorothy showed for the natural world in their practices today.

Die Dissertation untersucht Samuel Taylor Coleridges Praxis der Selbstredaktion in den Jahren von 1814 bis 1818 und beleuchtet dabei die zentrale Rolle, die William Wordsworths The Excursion, 1814 als Teil von The Recluse erschienen, in der Herausbildung von Coleridges Œuvre einnimmt. Die Arbeit entwickelt ihre zentrale These zu Coleridges Überarbeitungspraxis durch eine detaillierte Analyse der Verfahren, über die Coleridge aufhörte, durch Wordsworth zu sprechen. Ich beziehe mich dabei in erster Linie auf die Überarbeitungen von Biographia Literaria (1817), Sibylline Leaves (1817) und dem 1818 erschienenen rifacciamento zu dem Periodikum The Friend, das ursprünglich 1809–1810 publiziert worden war. Vor dem Hintergrund von Coleridges in den 1790er- und 1800er-Jahren neu aufgekommener und sich später weiterentwickelnder Rezeption von Immanuel Kants kritischer Philosophie werde ich argumentieren, dass sich die „radikale Differenz“ zwischen Coleridge und Wordsworth, die seit den Lyrical Ballads (1798) und dem „Preface“ (1800) bestand, weiter verstärkte, nachdem es Wordsworth nicht gelungen war, das groß angelegte Konzept eines „first genuine philosophical poem“ – The Recluse – zu vollenden. Insbesondere nachdem Coleridge 1807 The Prelude gehört hatte, enttäuschte The Excursion nach den Maßstäben seiner „vergleichenden Kritik“ seine lang gehegten Erwartungen. Während sein organisches Weltbild einen aktiven Geist kannte, der nach universaler „Wahrheit“ sowohl durch innere synthetisierende Kräfte als auch empirische Naturgesetze strebt, gründete sich Wordsworths Gedicht auf ein obskur-labiles Fundament zwischen Außenwelt und Selbst. Coleridges aus seinen eigenen Theorien zu Sprache und Einbildungskraft erwachsene Enttäuschung über The Excursion und die nachfolgende Loslösung von Wordsworth und ihrem gemeinsamen Werk verschafften ihm letztendlich die notwendige Autonomie, die einerseits einen nüchternen Blick auf die eigene Vergangenheit und andererseits eine dialogische Freundschaft zu Wordsworth ermöglichten, innerhalb derer Coleridge die Bedeutsamkeit erkannte, zu einem Freund zu sprechen. / This thesis is an examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s revisionary activity from 1814 to 1818, considering the integral role of William Wordsworth’s The Excursion, published as part of The Recluse in 1814, on Coleridge’s conception of his discrete oeuvre. It is via a detailed analysis of the way Coleridge ceased to speak “through” Wordsworth that this thesis unfolds its principal argument on Coleridge’s revisionary activity. I principally consider the revisions at work in the Biographia Literaria (1817), Sibylline Leaves (1817) and the 1818 rifacciamento to The Friend (the periodical originally issued in 1809-1810). Taking into account Coleridge’s newly-emerging and subsequently evolving responses to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy in the 1790s and 1800s, I will argue that the already-existing “radical Difference” between Coleridge and Wordsworth ever since the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the “Preface” (1800) further intensified following Wordsworth’s failure to bring their grand scheme for a “first genuine philosophical poem”, The Recluse, into completion. Especially after The Prelude Coleridge heard in 1807, The Excursion by means of his “comparative censure” fell short of meeting the long-cherished expectations. Whereas Coleridge’s organic view of the world involved the recognition of an active mind seeking universal “Truth” through the inner synthetic faculties as well as the empirical laws in nature, Wordsworth’s poem was founded upon an obscurely precarious ground between the phenomenal world and the inner self. Ultimately, Coleridge’s disappointment with The Excursion on the basis of his theories on language and imagination, and the ensuing detachment from Wordsworth and their joint oeuvre gave him the autonomy to revise his past works in a way that ensured formation of a more sober relationship with his own past and a dialogic friendship with Wordsworth in which Coleridge came to realise the importance of speaking to a friend.

This essay is an ecocritical analysis on William Wordsworths “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and Edgar Allan Poes “Alone”. It investigates the depiction of nature, the space within nature poetry and the common theme of loneliness in the poems. The ecocritical perspective plays the main part of this essay because of the similarity between the ecocriticism and romantic poetry in the upliftment of nature, and the erasure of the dividing line between human and nature. The main material is Timothy Mortons Ecology without nature, Jane Bennetts Vibrant Matter and Scott Knickerbockers Ecopoetics. The results of the essay show how the depiction of nature contributes to the representation of the poet’s emotion and relation to nature and the past. It shows how the space, the distance between human and nature, maintains because we can’t get closer to nature than through figurations, anthropomorphisms. It also shows how the loneliness further establishes the space and is quite different between Wordsworth and Poe, whereas Wordsworth doesn’t feel as alone as Poe because of his closer relation to nature.

This thesis explores three of Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal texts, Nature (1836), the "Woodnotes" poems (1840, 1841), and Representative Men (1850), in a transatlantic Romantic context. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's literature which often use these three works in demonstration of the various European Romantic assimilations n Emerson's writing, the texts considered in this study are understood to engage with one British work predominately. Emerson engages antagonistically in the pages of Nature with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), in the "Woodnotes" poems with William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814), and in Representative Men with Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). In each instance, Emerson engages with a text that he understands to be particularly representative of the intellectual and creative genius that its British author wields and, as such, one that is anxiety-inducing in the influence that it wields. This thesis demonstrates that, in engaging with these works, Emerson performs with increasing sophistication a process of "'creative reading,' that is, an act of reading (influx) through which creation (efflux, expression) is made possible through a transcendence of the past. In doing so, Emerson confronts and attempts to gain independence both from the personal influence that these texts and, more significantly, their authors wield. In engaging in Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men with Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively, Emerson assimilates into his works various elements of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's thought. Each of the three chapters comprising this thesis explores Emerson's intellectual indebtedness in this regard and, as such, the explorations incorporate a scholastic focus like that found in the majority of Emersonian transatlantic scholarship. In each instance, however, explorations of Emerson's works also reveal the American writer's performance of a liberating act of detachment or departure from the ideas with which he engages. These intellectual detachments distinguish Emerson's thought from that of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and are often attended by formal departures from the texts with which Emerson engages. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's works, this thesis focuses not only Emerson's Romantic assimilations, but also on his detachments. Finally, in each instance, Emerson's confrontations reflect Robert Weisbuch's assessment in Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) that nineteenth century Anglo-American literary relations are 'always more than personal and individual' (21). That is to say, in each instance, Emerson confronts not only Coleridge, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's personal creative and intellectual influence, but their extrapersonal or national influence as British writers. This confrontation of national influence is reflected in the fact that Emerson's detachments incorporate temporal reimaginings, re-visions of time that nullify the potency of the past and of the influence wielded by tradition by emphasising the present and the future, focusing on the subjective power of the mind. As such, Emerson's conceptions of time demonstrate a conflation of two specifically American understandings of temporality as defined by Robert Weisbuch - vertical time and futurism - both developed by nineteenth century American writers in order to nullify the influence of Old World, specifically British, tradition, and to establish an account of time in which the United States' comparative lack of distinct cultural history is excused. In precis, this thesis demonstrates that Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men issue from Emerson's creative reading of Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively. These acts of creative reading demonstrate in each instance the inextricability of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's 'personal' creative and intellectual influence, as well as their 'extrapersonal' or national influence.

No description available.

The purpose of this thesis is to show, through a study of the letters and a comparison of the journals and poems, the extent of the influence of Dorothy Wordsworth on the poetry of William Wordsworth and to bring together for the first time evidence of her influence.

Despite its impact in generating a more positive reception toward Wordsworth's work among his contemporaries, The River Duddon volume has received comparatively little critical attention in recent scholarship. On some level, this is unsurprising given the relative unpopularity of Wordsworth's later work among modern readers, but I believe that the relative shortage of critical scholarship on The River Duddon is due, at least in part, to a symptomatic failure to read the volume in its entirety. This essay takes up the challenge of following Wordsworth's directive to read The River Duddon volume as a unified whole. While I cannot account for every inclusion, I set out to explore how the idea of collection functions as the unifying force governing the volume's organizational and thematic structure. I argue that although the individual pieces that make up the collection are distinct from each other in their style, subject matter, and date of composition, together they constitute an exploration of the beauty of Wordsworth's native region and his interest in harmonizing aesthetic principles of variety and unity. When read as parts of a dialogical exchange rather than as self-contained units, the individual texts in The River Duddon collectively present an array of perspectives through which Wordsworth not only celebrates the rich diversity of the Lake District's local customs and landscapes, but also theorize a sophisticated poetics of collection which he hoped would help justify his poetic program and reinforce the literary and cultural weight of his future work.

《序曲》一直以來被視認為華茲華斯的自傳詩，描述華茲華斯如何憑藉自身心靈與自然的互動，發展獨立整合的自我。然而，《序曲》文本結構上的多重性與不完整性，卻與華茲華斯所提倡的自我形象相抵觸。本篇論文將依據德希達的翻譯理論，由三方面探討華茲華斯如何透過書寫《序曲》形塑自身詩人形象的身份認同。首先，寫作《序曲》是華茲華斯的譯者天職 (the task of the translator)。唯有完成書寫《序曲》此一必要卻又不可能的任務 (a necessary and impossible task)，華茲華斯才可確立自己作為詩人的身份認同。再者，華茲華斯的詩人身份仰賴華茲華斯之名的翻譯 (the translation of Wordsworth's proper name)。華茲華斯之名的可譯與不可譯 (the translatability and untranslatability of Wordsworth’s proper name)促使華茲華斯不斷地進行翻譯與改寫，因而造成了《序曲》文本結構上的多重性與不完整性。最後，《序曲》將以華茲華斯的「佚傳」(otobiography) 而非自傳的方式進行重新詮釋，說明華茲華斯企圖透過書寫《序曲》所建立的自我身份認同，必須藉由「他者的耳朵」(the ear of the other)來確立。 / The Prelude has long been regarded as William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem in which he celebrates an autonomous and consistent self nourished from the interaction between his mind and Nature. However, the textual plurality and a sense of incompleteness of The Prelude contradicts the unique and unitary self-identity proposed by Wordsworth in this poem. On the basis of Derrida's theory of translation, this thesis intends to investigate the establishment of Wordsworth's identity as a poet in The Prelude in three aspects. First, the writing and completion of The Prelude is Wordsworth's task of the translator, the necessary and impossible task in search of an identity as a poet. Second, the constitution of Wordsworth's identity as a poet depends on the translation of Wordsworth's proper name which calls for and against translation at the same time. The translatability and untranslatability of Wordsworth's proper name leads to the textual plurality and incompleteness of The Prelude as the result of Wordsworth's endless translation of his name. Last but not least, The Prelude is not so much Wordsworth's autobiographical poem as Wordsworth's otobiography which calls for the ear of the other to constitute his self-identity by hearing and signing with him. This thesis endeavors to prove that Wordsworth, in the position of an indebted translator committed to an insolvent debt and non-dischargeable duty by a translation contract with Nature and Coleridge, is obliged to translate his proper name in search of the sur-vival of his name as a poet and his poetry by writing The Prelude as his otobiography which is always open to and demands the ear of the other to recognize and affirm Wordsworth's name as a great poet.

In 1963, M.H. Abrams suggested that the ultimate source of Wordsworth's poetry is the Bible, and, in particular, the New Testament. This thesis, however, demonstrates the importance of the Old Testament and offers the first extended analysis of Wordsworth's use of Old Testament rhetoric. It examines both his affectionate perceptions of the natural world, and the Biblical recollections that saturate his writing. The purpose is to align two critical discourses - on Scripture and topography - and in doing so, situate Wordsworth's sense of himself as a poet-prophet in both Britain and America. The four chapters are structured topographically (Dwelling, Vales, Mountains, Rivers), and organised around a phenomenological experience of lived space, as expressed in key poems. Close analysis of Wordsworth's poetic language from Descriptive Sketches to Yarrow Revisited reveals the influence of the Bible (and the recent analysis of sacred Hebrew poetry undertaken by Lowth), while the theories of Heidegger and Bachelard provide a conceptual approach to Wordsworth's investment in nature. The epilogue opens questions of Wordsworth's reception in America by exploring the awareness of cultural and physical geography and sense of Wordsworth's prophetic ministry amongst his heirs. The thesis concludes that Wordsworth's extensive recourse to scriptural language and the physical landscape strengthened his claim to be a Prophet of Nature. His poetry self-consciously adopted the universal 'language of men' - that of the King James Bible.

Representations of the Gypsies and their lifestyle were widespread in British culture in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis analyzes the varying literary and artistic responses to the Gypsy figure in the period circa 1780-1870. Addressing not only well-known works by William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Clare, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, but also lesser-known or neglected works by Gilbert White, Hannah More, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers, unpublished archival material from Princess Victoria's journals, and a range of articles from the periodical press, this thesis examines how the figure of the Gypsy was used to explore differing conceptions of the landscape, identity and freedom, as well as the authoritative discourses of law, religion and science. The influence of William Cowper's Gypsy episode in Book One of The Task is shown to be profound, and its effect on ensuing literary representations of the Gypsy is an example of my interpretation of Wim Willem's term ‘paper Gypsies': the idea that literary Gypsies are often textual (re)constructions of other writers' work, creating a shared literary, cultural and artistic heritage. A focus on the picturesque and the Gypsies' role within that genre is a strong theme throughout this thesis. The ambiguity of picturesque Gypsy representations challenges the authority of the leisured viewer, provoking complex responses that either seek to contain the Gypsy's disruptive potential or demonstrate the figure's refusal to be controlled. An examination of texts alongside contemporary paintings and sketches of Gypsies by Princess Victoria, George Morland, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and John Everett Millais, elucidates the significance of the Gypsies as ambiguous ciphers in both literature and art.